With white, bare feet, her hair loosely knotted, clad as the starlight knew her, and the morning when she rose from slumber, save that she had twisted a scarf round her long dress, she stood still as a stone before me, holding in one hand a lighted coil of waxtaper, and in the other a silver goblet.  I held my own lamp close to her, as if she had been a figure of marble, and she did not stir.  There was no breach of propriety then, to scare the Poor Relation with and breed scandal out of.  She had been “warned in a dream,” doubtless suggested by her waking knowledge and the sounds which had reached her exalted sense.  There was nothing more natural than that she should have risen and girdled her waist, and lighted her taper, and found the silver goblet with “Ex dono pupillorum” on it, from which she had taken her milk and possets through all her childish years, and so gone blindly out to find her place at the bedside,—­a Sister of Charity without the cap and rosary; nay, unknowing whither her feet were leading her, and with wide blank eyes seeing nothing but the vision that beckoned her along.—­Well, I must wake her from her slumber or trance.—­I called her name, but she did not heed my voice.

The Devil put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young girl before I died, and now was my chance.  She never would know it, and I should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and a rose perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord Lovers, in memory of that immortal moment!  Would it wake her from her trance? and would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph, and hate and despise me ever after?  Or should I carry off my trophy undetected, and always from that time say to myself, when I looked upon her in the glory of youth and the splendor of beauty, “My lips have touched those roses and made their sweetness mine forever”?  You think my cheek was flushed, perhaps, and my eyes were glittering with this midnight flash of opportunity.  On the contrary, I believe I was pale, very pale, and I know that I trembled.  Ah, it is the pale passions that are the fiercest,—­it is the violence of the chill that gives the measure of the fever!  The fighting-boy of our school always turned white when he went out to a pitched battle with the bully of some neighboring village; but we knew what his bloodless cheeks meant,—­the blood was all in his stout heart,—­he was a slight boy, and there was not enough to redden his face and fill his heart both at once.

Perhaps it is making a good deal of a slight matter, to tell the internal conflicts in the heart of a quiet person something more than juvenile and something less than senile, as to whether he should be guilty of an impropriety, and, if he were, whether he would get caught in his indiscretion.  And yet the memory of the kiss that Margaret of Scotland gave to Alain Chartier has lasted four hundred years, and put it into the head of many an ill-favored poet,